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Your competitors can be a goldmine of information that can inform every aspect of your marketing and rocket your website’s traffic.

In this article you’ll find:

A short list of the best competitor analysis tools available right now.

A super detailed competitor website analysis using the two most powerful tools from that list.

Let’s get started!

Competitor analysis tools

Competitor analysis is a lot easier when you have the right tools. We’ve tried out a ton of different services over the years, so we feel confident in saying that these are the best.

1. SimilarWeb — Widely used as a traffic estimation tool, SimilarWeb has loads of cool features that let you peek behind the scenes at your competitor’s strategy.

Find out which channels are driving traffic to your competition — with stats for traffic distribution, top organic & paid search keywords, top ad networks, audience interests, and competing websites.

Sounds like a lot. And it is.

2. Ahrefs — Yes, we’re biased, but there’s a reason Ahrefs is consistently listed as one of the top SEO tools in the industry.

Our primary focus is SEO and content analysis, and you can use our tool to analyse competitor keywords (organic and PPC), backlinks, traffic stats and more.

Find out which pages on your competitor’s site are bringing in the most backlinks, social shares, and traffic, by running the ‘Top Pages’ reports. Or dig deep into their link profiles with Site Explorer.

With 192 billion pages in our database, we’ve got the largest index of backlinks on the web.

Note:

Later in this post, you’ll find a detailed sample competitor website analysis carried out with just the 2 tools above. So if that’s why you’re here, just jump to it.

3. Audiense — This service will help you analyze your competitors’ audience based on their Twitter followers.

See stats on location, gender, interests, and the languages of those who follow your competitor.

9. Fanpage karma — This service can show you the best (and worst) performing posts from your competitor’s Facebook fan page. Uncover the most frequently used words and hashtags, and analyse user reactions.

Fanpage karma will also give you hints on what type of content to post on Facebook, and the times of day to post, by analysing your competitor’s performance.

Plus you’ll get an estimate of the advertising value of your competitor’s Facebook posts.

Sample website analysis

Our blog is focused on content and SEO, so that’s what we’re going to focus on in our sample competitive analysis.

And for the purposes of the walk-through, we’ll pretend we’re about to launch a brand new infographic design tool.

Part 1: Identifying Competitors

The first thing we need to do is identify our main competitors.

To do that we need to know exactly how potential customers will search for our service.

I figured that would be something like ‘infographic design tool’. But turns out I was wrong.

Because when I search for ‘infographic design tool’ in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer (and click on ‘Also Rank For’), we can see that the search with the highest volume is actually ‘infographic maker’.

With a KD (keyword difficulty) score of 93, it’s going to be tough to rank for. But if we want to be the biggest in the infographic design business, then that’s got to be our ultimate aim.

Now let’s run a Google search and see who’s ranking.

Looks like the 3 guys I’ve highlighted under ‘organic search’ are going to be our top competition in search. But I’m also interested in the two companies who are running ads on the keyword.

So, I’m going to grab all 5 and add them to a new spreadsheet:

Now let’s pull some key stats to see what we’re up against.

Pulling Key Stats For Each Competitor

To give us an idea of how entrenched the competition is (and how tough it will be to break into the niche) we’re going to pull some stats and metrics for each of our competitor’s domains.

First, let’s find out how much overall authority (power) each site has.

We’ll get a load of useful stats back for each site. But for now I’m interested in:

The Domain Rating for each site

The total number of referring domains (Ref Domains).

A high DR score indicates that the site has good authority and is likely to rank well in search.

A high number of referring domains could also be an indicator of a strong site — provided those links are not low quality.

At a later stage we’ll want to figure out whether that’s because the site/service is organically popular, or if they have a particularly effective link building/PR strategy. Either way, we’ll be able to gain an insight by fully analysing their backlink profile (here’s how to do it).

But for now I’ll add the figures to my spreadsheet.

As you can see, all of the sites have a high number of referring domains and good authority.

Why These Metrics Are Important

SEO metrics give you an indication of the overall competitiveness of a niche.

When your competitors have a high DR score they are likely to have been around for a while and acquired a solid backlink profile.

In a nutshell:

More quality links = higher DR score = more trust from Google.

So what does this mean?

In simple terms, if 2 sites launch a piece of content targeting the same keyword, then the site with the higher DR score will (probably) rank highest.

So if your site is new and is in a competitive niche with high DR scores, then your initial plan should be to build links directly to pages you want to rank.

And as you do that…

Your DR score will also start to increase!

Sidenote.

Domain Rating scores are exponential, so it’s easier to get from DR10 to DR20 than it is to get from DR20 to DR30 (and so on). Which means a site with a DR score of 80 isn’t twice as powerful as a site with DR40 — it could be many times more powerful.

I should also point out that Google deny overall domain authority influences rankings, however, all our testing finds a strong positive correlation between DR and rankings. That being said, as we also found links to individual pages trump overall DR it could be that this is caused by sites with higher DR naturally attracting more backlinks to individual pages. Remember, correlation is not necessarily causation.

Analysing Competitor Link Growth

Next I want to get a feel for how many new referring domains each site is acquiring per month.

Why?

Because your competitors won’t stand still.

So, if one of your competitors is acquiring 200 new referring domains each month, then you’ll probably need to build more than that just to catch them.

This is not an exact science, but if we take an average over the past few months we can get an idea of how things are moving.

We can do that by running the ‘New Referring domains’ report in Ahrefs Site Explorer and setting the period accordingly.

Looks like easel.y acquired 672 new referring domains in the 3 month period between August and October. So that’s an average of 224 per month.

I’ll run this report for each of our competitors and add the numbers to my spreadsheet.

Checking The Link Acquisition Curve

It’s also worth checking out if your competitor’s link growth is consistent, or if they have experienced a big growth over a short period.

The ‘Referring domains’ graph on the Site Explorer Overview page shows us link growth over the past year in a nice visual format.

For example, we can see that Venngage’s link growth has been consistent.

While Visme have had a big spike in referring domains over the past few months.

That could be the sign of an active SEO campaign. So we might want to take a closer look at their recent backlinks to find out what they’ve been up to.

We can nip back to the ‘New referring domains’ report and select a period to analyse. Below I have filtered the report to show referring domains for October (view individual links by clicking the ‘Backlinks’ button).

I’ll probably want to export this report for later analysis.

Why Understanding Competitor Link Growth Is Important

Link popularity remains the biggest single SEO ranking factor.

Which means that over time you’ll want to build a link profile which is on a par with (or ideally better than) your competitors.

Understanding the rate at which your competitors are acquiring new referring domains (linking sites) gives you a rough target to shoot for with your link building.

In my example niche, the number of new linking sites each month is pretty high. But in other niches you’ll find link growth is slower, or even static.

Either way, your aim should be to acquire links faster than your competitors.

Sidenote.

I should point out that not all links are equal. One link from a high DR site may be worth the same as several links from low DR sites. See chapter 1 of our link building guide for more on assessing the value of a link.

Part 2: Traffic Analysis

We know who our competitors are. We’ve grabbed their key metrics. It’s now time to take a look at their traffic.

Now, in an ideal world, we’d be able to take a peek at our competitor’s Google Analytics account to find out which channels are driving their traffic…

…but as that’s about as likely as Scotland winning the World Cup, the next best thing is to get an approximation from SimilarWeb.

We can do that by running the Traffic Sources Overview report.

We’ll get a percentage figure for each channel.

And we’ll also get a chart showing estimated traffic volumes.

Of course ‘Social’ doesn’t really tell us much. So the good news is we can click through to get an actual breakdown by platform.

Much better.

Why Traffic Sources Are Important

Understanding which sources provide the most traffic to your competitors will help you decide where to focus your marketing efforts.

For example, in certain niches, there might be huge traffic from social media.

If we look at publishing giant Buzzfeed’s traffic sources, we can see that they get over 50% of their traffic from social:

So if you were launching a site in the publishing space you’d want to make sure your content was highly shareable.

In other niches, organic search might be the biggy.

Travel site TripAdvisor get two thirds of their traffic from search, with just 1% coming from social:

And if you’re running an Ecommerce site, then you might find your competitors are spending more on ads.

Online beauty retailers LookFantastic pick up around 14% of their traffic from paid search:

As you can see traffic sources vary from niche to niche, so it’s essential that you know exactly where the traffic is in yours.

What The Traffic Sources Data Tells Us

Here are the traffic sources for our 5 competitors.

While there is some variation from site-to-site, we can infer a general trend and rank traffic sources for the niche:

Direct Traffic

Search Traffic

Referral Traffic

Social Traffic

Email Traffic

PPC Traffic

Display Traffic

Indeed, if we calculate the average value for each channel we get the following:

Between direct traffic (typed in URLs, bookmarks), search traffic (let’s call a spade a spade: that’s Google) and referrals (link clicks from other websites) we have over 90% of total traffic for the niche.

Which suggests our growth strategy should be:

a) Acquiring new customers from Google search and referral traffic

b) Retaining them

I won’t be covering client acquisition and retention in this guide. But as it’s clear our competitors’ strategies are effective, here are a few pointers for what we would want to look at:

How do they convert them from potential customers into actual customers?

How do they retain them?

What we will be taking a closer look at is our competitors’ organic traffic and referral traffic.

Organic traffic will be covered in part 3, but for now, let’s find out what’s driving all that referral traffic.

Sidenote.

I already mentioned that SimilarWeb traffic figures are estimates. They should not be considered to be 100% accurate, but in the absence of precise data they are sufficient to give us an insight into our competitor’s traffic levels and sources.

Which Sites Provide The Most Referrals?

Now we’ll take a look at which sites are currently providing the most referrals to our competitor.

With a free SimilarWeb account we can see the top 5 referring sites by running the ‘Referrals’ report under ‘Traffic Sources’.

Here are the top 5 referrers for easel.ly.

Why Understanding Your Competitor’s Top Referrers Is Important

What’s the best kind of link to get to your site?

We already covered metrics. So you might think that the answer would be a link from a high DR site.

And yes, that’s a great link to get. It’s definitely going to help move your site up the search engine rankings.

But the very best kind of link is a link that drives actual referral traffic.

After all, that’s what links are for right?

When you know which sites drive referral traffic to your competitors you can make it a priority to pick up links from them.

The best bit:

Without getting too technical, it’s very likely that Google assesses the likelihood of a link being clicked when calculating how much weight it should pass to your site.

So not only will they send you traffic, they’re going to be powerful links for SEO purposes too.

Which is why knowledge of your competitor’s top referrers is marketing gold.

What The Referral Data Tells Us

We already know that referrals account for (roughly) 25% of all traffic in the niche.

As with SimilarWeb our traffic figures are estimates and should not be considered 100% accurate, but in the absence of precise data they are sufficient to give us an insight into our competitor’s organic traffic.

Spying On Our Competitor’s Organic Keywords

Next we want to find out which keywords are currently driving our competitors’ search traffic.

We can do that by running the ‘Organic keywords’ report for each domain.

It can be tempting to go for keywords with big volume. But a high KD score means it will be tough to rank without building a lot of links.

Our enhanced Keywords Explorer tool provides an estimate of the number of backlinks required to rank for a keyword.

For example, ‘infographic maker’, which has a KD score of 93, will require backlinks from 1,033 domains to rank in the top 10 positions.

If you’ve got your link building down, then go for it. Otherwise, it might be worth targeting keywords with a lower difficulty score to begin with.

Sidenote.

Our keyword difficulty score is calculated by counting the number of individual sites (referring domains) pointing to each result in Google’s Top10 for a keyword. As backlinks remain the single biggest SEO ranking factor we find that in most cases this score provides an accurate representation of the difficulty of a keyword.

That being said, there are many other factors which influence rankings beside backlinks (on-page SEO, content depth etc) so we recommend further analysis of the search result/competition before selecting a keyword to target. We do have plans to include other factors in our difficulty calculations in the future — so watch this space!

There is one more important thing you should pay attention to while analyzing your rival’s organic traffic.

SERP features your competitor ranks for.

The number of SERP features Google provides in search results is constantly growing. Featured snippets alone, for example, are shown for 12% of search queries, as per our recent study. And they get almost 10% of clicks from the results on the first page.

Can you afford to neglect this?

“Organic keywords” report can show you what SERP features your competitor occupies, ranking for a specific keyword.

You need to apply “Features” filter, choose “Target domain must be featured” option and tick the relevant SERP features (I will tick all to give you the full picture):

As you can see, Visme is ranking in a bunch of various SERP features for quite a few good keywords.

Finding (And Filling) Content Gaps

What’s a content gap?

It’s a keyword your competitors rank for, which you don’t.

Needless to say, that’s a gap you’ll want to fill!

So the good news is Ahrefs has a tool specifically designed to help you find these gaps. We’ve cunningly called it our ‘Content gap’ tool.

By entering competitor domains into the tool you can quickly find a bunch of cool new keywords to target on your own site.

In the example below I have compared 1 of our competitor’s sites against the other 4. This is because my hypothetical infographics company doesn’t actually have a website (well maybe a hypothetical one, but that’s no use here). Normally you will be comparing your own site against your competitors.

Note that I set the report to show me keywords where at least 2 of my competitors rank and at least one ranks top 10.

And it looks like there are plenty of content gaps for us to fill.

So we can go ahead and pick some cool ones for adding to our content plan.

Recommendation

If your site is relatively new, use the ‘Volume’ and ‘Difficulty’ filters to find keywords with good search volume and a low difficulty score. The low difficulty score means they will be easier to rank for, while the solid search volume means that ranking will give a nice bump to your search traffic.

Finding A Competitor’s Most Popular Content

We can discover our competitor’s most visited content (organic search) by running the ‘Top Pages’ report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Sidenote.

We’re interested in editorial content/blog posts here, which means for most sites we’ll want to search the blog folder URL/subdomain as opposed to the entire domain. For example, if I was analysing Ahrefs I would search ahrefs.com/blog.

In the above example we can see that Visme’s content with the highest search traffic is a post about visual advertising techniques. It’s currently bringing in around 647 organic search visits per month and ranking for 304 keywords.

We can view the individual keywords the page is ranking for by clicking the number under the keywords column.

Looks like by moving up a few positions that page could receive a lot more search traffic.

Why This Report Is Super Valuable

The old school approach to SEO involved conducting keyword research to find suitable phrases to rank for, then creating individual content for each of those keywords.

100 target keywords = 100 new pages on your site

1,000 target keywords = 1,000 new pages on your site

Needless to say it was pretty laborious. Not to mention costly.

These days?

As Google gets better at understanding the meaning behind content, one great article can rank for hundreds or even THOUSANDS of keywords. Even if that keyword doesn’t appear anywhere on the page.

An example we often use is guest posting.

That’s the same thing as guest blogging right?

And Google knows that.

Search for ‘guest posting’ and Google will also return pages that are optimised for the keyword ‘guest blogging’. They even highlight the word ‘guest blogging’ in the URL and content.

So why is this report so valuable?

Well, by finding your competitors ‘top content’ you can figure out which of their articles are:

a) ranking for a ton of keywords

b) pulling in loads of traffic

And then instead of starting with a big list of keywords, you can start with a small list of articles to replicate which you already know Google associates with multiple keywords.

Much less time consuming. And much less costly.

Finding Your Competitor’s Most Linked To Content

To find our competitor’s most linked to content we’ll run the ‘Best by links’ report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s a ton of information we can use to create our own marketing and growth strategy.

But guess what?

It’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Both tools (Ahrefs and SimilarWeb) have a treasure trove of additional reports we can run to, not just peek behind our competitor’s marketing curtain, but rip it down to expose their entire marketing, content, and link building strategies.

Ready to get started?

You can sign up for a 7 day trial of Ahrefs here and a SimilarWeb account here.